By Lottie Merchant, Second Year, English
Ethan Coen (one part of the well-known co-directors: the Coen brothers) is back with the second part of his loosely connected, Margaret Qualley led, lesbian-centred trilogy. Following the somewhat well received Drive away Dolls (2023), Honey, Don’t! (2025) came out this September and is already attaining a pretty dismal reception.
After reading my fair few of the seemingly harsh reviews, I was determined to give this film a chance - as I enjoy a lot of Maragret Qualley’s performances - and I am partial to a bit of frivolous fun in my cinematic endeavours. I was sufficiently prefaced that this film was intentionally meant to have a kitschy B-movie type style, and I really didn’t go into it expecting a Nolan epic or a really moving, serious drama. But there is being playful and stylistic with film… and then there’s Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t!. Don’t get me wrong, the star-studded cast provided some good performances and the cinematography and aesthetic merit of the film is applaudable - but that’s about it. The nonsensical amalgamation of storylines and unmemorable characters was a little too directionless, meaningless and pointless for me to be able to write a positive review about this film! So let us work through a few of the reasons why this film fell flat for me.
The first, and probably most significant mistake this film made was with its plotlines and characters. There was just way too many of them. When I read a few reviews and synopses of Honey Don’t!, I found that they all seemed completely different in their choice of plot summary. I think this can be put down to the fact that there isn’t one most important storyline to follow and all of them feel inconsequential and almost isolated within themselves. Let’s run through a short list of the major (and I use the word lightly here) plots and sub plots in the film. 1) You’ve got Honey O’Donoghue (played by Margaret Qualley), the titular protagonist, solving the case of Mia Novotny’s (played by Kara Peterson) death, 2) There is the sex-cult church ran by Reverend Drew Devlin (played by Chris Evans), who is maintaining a drug business with the French, 3) MG (played by Aubrey Plaza) and Honey have a romantic (if you can even call it that) relationship, 4) Honey’s father returns to amend his relationship with her, 5) a string of unconnected and unimportant characters get murdered as a result of the drug business ran by the reverend, and finally, 6) Honey’s niece Corinne (played by Talia Ryder) goes missing. Why on earth did we need this many stories with this many unmemorable characters! The 80-minute runtime begins to feel like three and a half hours when one story relentlessly rambles into another, I lost sight of what murder Honey was even solving. I think this can be contributed to the fact that each uninspiring plot is given similar amounts of prevalence and screen time within the film, which, if Coen was going for a Pulp Fiction (1994) -esque experimental film, he needed his characters to carry more weight and dimension (because none of them were exactly Mia Wallace or Vincent Vega).
The second major issue I had with this film is that it was boring and didn’t tell us anything about anything. Yes, I am aware of the intentional B-movie style Coen was going for, but the film brought up interesting topics like church corruption and the fetishisation of lesbian relationships and then immediately put them straight back down again. The Four-way Temple Church was basically a red herring. The death of Mia Novotny (the first murder) had nothing to do with the church despite her being a member and wearing their symbol in her ring. MG being behind the murder of Mia and the kidnapping of Corinne was a weird and boring choice. She had no rational motive other than the fact she wanted to save them from the submission of men. Which personally, and maybe this is tenuous, I didn’t love, because it positions lesbian women as crazy and hysterical, whilst the church didn’t appear to have anything to do with it. In fact, the whole representation of lesbianism felt like it was written by a man. Charlie Day’s whole character revolved around basically not being able to fathom she wasn’t attracted to men - all the male characters repeatedly sexualised her, and the chemistry between MG and Honey was definitely not anything to call home about. Maybe this film just wasn’t for me, but I simply couldn’t find any message or anything remotely interesting about it.
Harry Mayes
The only ‘crime’ worth noting in this film was its lack of motive, drive or structural cohesion. Maybe I am the fun police - I imagine some people out there enjoyed watching it - but for the majority, this film is too boring, too awkward and too flat to be described by words such as frivolous, playful or fun. Honey, don’t! bother watching this one.
Featured Image: IMDB / Honey Don't!
What did you think of Honey Don't!?
